They are hugely energy intensive and a good way of exporting cheap electricity from otherwise hard to connect locations. The very bottom of New Zealand, The North east of South Africa as well as Mozambique, the Middle East and of course Norway and Russia. Hydroelectric power, free once the dam is built, is ideal, but oil (Middle East) and coal (Southern Africa) are also used.

They are generally located next to a port so that bulk shipments of alumina and carbon (coal) are easily transferred. The carbon is used to make the anodes and cathodes used in the giant 'pots' where the reaction happens.

The metal itself is alloyed up in final form, but is generally shipped from the smelters in pure ignots, at a price related to the LME quoted price.

And a bonus - we were forbidden to have aluminium cans on site. If they ended up in a pot (full of molten bubbling alumina, cryolite and aluminium) then any fluid left inside the can would get super heated and result in an explosion.

Sir Humphrey Davy, its discoverer, called it Aluminum when he published his work Chemical Philosophy in 1812.

Some anonymous dilettante (anonymous to this day!) thought, upon reviewing said book, it sounded better (more classical) with the extra I and syllable.

Everybody calls Aluminum's oxide Alumina, not Aluminia.

Nobody else seems to feel the need to rename Platinum Platinium, or Molybdenum Molybdenium, or Tantalum Tantalium.

We Americans too often like to mock other cultures for being different, and our basis is usually wrong when we do. Maybe mocking our pronunciation and spelling isn't a habit you want to hold on to.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-09/amazing-rustin...

  Indeed, there is a growing industry for manufacturing 
  industrial sapphires the size of a large bucket, suitable 
  for use in bullet-proof glass, aeroplane windows and soon 
  - unscratchable smartphone displays.

My phone was damaged and I wondered if my keys scratched my SG3 smartphone, Gorilla Glass has a hardness from what I have read anywhere from a 3 to a 6 but corundum (oxidized aluminum) has a Mohs hardness of 9. Then I found out scratch resistance is not hardness. I think the SG3 screen's scratch resistance is significantly inferior to the SG2 screen.

With continued recycling [over a long period of time] there is concern that alloys will converge upon a final aluminum alloy and we will no longer be able to create new application specific alloys.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/nanoaluminum-rocket-fuel.html

-- Jára da Cimrman